A GUIDE TO USING HISTORICAL RESOURCES ON THE INTERNET
CONTENTS
Determining A Site's
Trustworthiness
Finding Electronic
Journals on the Net
Primary Source Materials
on the Net
Finding Primary Source
Material on the Web
Finding General
Historical Sites on the Web
Citing
Web-based Material
NOTE
This site is created primarily for the use of members of
the
Determining A Site's Trustworthiness
There is an enormous, ever growing, and ever changing volume of websites and webpages of a historical nature. These may loosely be divided under four heads:
Obviously not all sites fit readily under any one head and some combine more than one function. It is, nevertheless, important in evaluating the usefulness of any site to get some sense of what sort of site it is. In particular, it is necessary to get some sense of provenance -- where the site is hosted -- and authorship.
The first clue is in the web address (URL =
uniform resource location). Academic
sites hosted by universities and higher
educational institutes will frequently contain ac. or edu. within
the main part of the address, e.g. http://www.york.ac.uk/ or
http://www.anu.edu.au/. There are, however, a number of countries which use
different designators for universities (e.g. univ- in
Sites posted by governmental organisations (both local and national) often use the designator gov. These include archive offices and government departments. These sometimes post collections of primary source material or pages that include primary source materials, e.g. http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award97/ncuhtml/fpnashome.html
The designator org. embraces variously
semi-official or governmental bodies, societies and more commercial bodies.
Sites posted by private individuals or commercial organizations will invariably be hosted by a commercial internet provider, e.g. http://www.geocities.com/ or http://www.treko.net.au/, the designators com. and net. usually being indicative of such providers. (The designator org. embraces variously semi-official or governmental bodies, societies and more commercial bodies.)
Anyone can publish on the internet.
Be particularly wary of information posted by private individuals.
Do not assume that material on the web reflects
up to date scholarship or that because material is attractively presented that
it is a useful supplement, let alone a substitute for more conventional
publications.
The second clue is provided by indication, or non indication, of authorship. A couple of examples will illustrate the point.
Example 1.
'Forced Labour, Workhouse-Prisons And The Early Modern State: A Case Study' is hosted by the
http://www.history.ac.uk/eseminars/sem6.html
The author is clearly identified as 'Dr Thomas Munck (
Example 2.
'The Dreyfus Affair' is an article that forms
part of larger site on Russian Jewry hosted by a Dutch organisation with
backing from the Dutch foreign ministry and church organisations. The URL is:
http://www.friends-partners.org/partners/beyond-the-pale/english/25.html
The text for the whole site is credited to Joke Kniesmeyer and Daniel Cil Brecher. The text is likely to be factually sound, but
should not be regarded as a substitute for more substantial and scholarly
writings on the same subject.
Example 3.
'Medieval
http://www.britainexpress.com/History/Townlife.htm
There is no clear indication of authorship,
though the page ends with the notice that 'contents © 2001 David Ross and
Britain Express'. It follows that the information contained here should not be
regarded as scholarly and hence should be distrusted as a source of information
for academic purposes.
For sites offering secondary or
interpretative material, knowledge
of provenance and authorship may not be sufficient evidence by which to
determine the scholarly value of a site.
There is in fact a great deal of rather general lecture outline material
generated particularly out of American colleges which is intended to be no more
than an introduction to first year students taking broad survey courses. It
may, therefore, be of very limited value to
Example 4.
'Guilds and Commerce' can be shown from its URL*
-- http://mars.wnec.edu/~grempel/courses/wc1/lectures/24guilds.html
-- to be part of a series of lectures. The page ends with an invitation to
'send comments and suggestions to: Professor Gerhard Rempel,
at
* This original site ceased to operate before 2007, so the original URL given here is now incorporated within the archival URL.
Example 5.
'Arch 343: Cities in History: Lecture 9:
Medieval Cities,
The quality of bibliographical or reference material associated with any article, paper or lecture published on the web is in general a good clue to the scholarship that underpins it. Example 1 above is fully referenced and includes editions of primary materials alongside specialist articles and monographs. Example 2, on the other hand, offers no bibliographical information.
Finding Electronic Journals on the Net
The JBM Library catalogue provides links to electronic resources including journals marked with a symbol. Many of these journals are provided by JSTOR and represent full runs of past issues up until a few years of the present. Others represent runs of subscribed journals from the time electronic subscriptions became available. This is usually only within the past few years. In addition there are some journals published exclusively on the internet. A listing of such journals is available from The History Journals Guide.
Primary Source Materials on the Net
The web is an increasingly useful resource for access to primary materials, some of which have been published exclusively on the web. Broadly speaking there are three kinds of primary resource accessible via the web:
Electronic versions
This form of web publication is increasingly popular
because such material is comparatively easily produced by scanning conventional
hard copy publications. Copyright regulations, however, restrict the kind of
editions that can legitimately be so reproduced. As a consequence web-based
versions of printed sources often depend on old and not necessarily very
scholarly editions. Before using such editions, check whether more recent /
scholarly editions exist.
The advantage of electronic editions is that the
material is searchable, either by using a keyword search (press 'Edit' followed
by 'Find in Page...') or, with some sites, using more sophisticated search
facilities.
Two good examples of electronic versions of
material first published conventionally are The Nuremberg War Crimes
Trials and Norman Davis's edition of The
Paston Letters (volume 1 only). This last allows
for sophisticated searching. Such editions make it possible to search quickly
for particular persons, places, or subjects or alternatively to investigate the
way particular vocabulary and concepts were used.
Some electronic editions use the technology to
allow the reader to explore the text in ways that would be difficult with
conventional print editions. A good example is the hypertext edition of Bracton,
The Laws and Customs of England.
Scanned reproductions
This technology can allow one privileged access to primary
materials whether manuscript or print that may otherwise be found only in an
archive office or a rare books library. Good examples are Early English Books Online, The Making of America, and the Duderstadt digital municipal archive. Archive offices
will increasingly make use of this technology as a means of delivering access
to holdings.
Documents produced for publication
on the web
There is a miscellany of material that exists only as web
documents. A number of these are first person narratives of one sort or
another, notably oral history. Some examples are Louisiana
Holocaust Survivors, Hiroshoma Survivors, and Slave Narratives.
Finding Primary Source Material on the Web
Numbers of sites ('gateways') provide access
to primary sources. Unfortunately, the ephemeral nature of so much web
publication means that, unless sites are revised frequently, not all links will
be current. Sometimes this is simply because the address (URL) has changed, but
in other instances the site no longer exists.
A wide range of materials may be found on York
History Web. This site is largely confined to complete or at least more
substantial texts rather than, as is widely found, brief extracts.
More widely known are the Internet History
Sourcebooks compiled by Paul Halsall. Best known are
the Internet Medieval
Sourcebook and the Internet Modern
Sourcebook, but other related pages are linked to these. Many, but by no
means all the documents listed on these sites consist of brief extracts from
longer texts.
Medieval gateways:
ORB: Online
Reference Book for Medieval Studies
The Labyrinth
Early Modern gateways:
Centre
for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, Toronto
General gateways:
Intute:
Arts and Humanities
Finding General Historical Sites on the Web
In addition to the gateways noted above (under Finding Primary Source Material on the Web), the following gateways may be useful:
Medieval:
Virtual Library Index:
Medieval Europe
Netsurf:
Internet Connections for Medieval Resources
Early Modern:
Virtual Library Frühe Neuzeit
Early
Modern Resources
Others:
WWW
Virtual Library: Central Catalogue
Academic
Info: History Resources
Asian Studies WWW
Virtual Library
Searching for materials using gateways or pages containing numbers of categorised links is the equivalent of using a bibliography -- sites are pre-selected and categorised under specific subject headings. An alternative way of accessing historical materials is to use a search engine. This allows access to a much larger range of materials, though equally a much larger range of dross. There are many search engines available, though some of the best known are only able to access part of the internet, particularly commercial sites. A site widely used by academics is Google (http://www.google.co.uk). This allows for simple word searches or for more advanced searches.
Example.
Searching on 'South Sea Bubble' on
The web can be particularly effective if looking for brief biographical material or information about specific localities. Some aspects of the past, such as details of battles, genealogical information, historic buildings etc., are especially well represented.
The most commonly used convention is to provide author and title (if available) plus the full URL of the site cited followed in brackets by the date on which the site was accessed. For example:
'The Housewife's Rich Cabinet: Remedies,
Recipes, and Helpful Hints', <http://www.folger.edu/public/exhibit/Housewives/housewif.htm>
(
I. Mather, Cases of Conscience concerning evil Spirits Personating Men, Witchcrafts, infallible Proofs of Guilt in such as are accused with that Crime (Boston, 1693), consulted online at Salem Witch Trials: Documentary Archive and Transcription Project <http://etext.virginia.edu/salem/witchcraft/speccol> (5 August 2002)
An example of a reference to a conventionally
published work made available on the internet would be:
H. Taylor, The Claim of Englishwomen to the Suffrage
Constitutionally Considered (
A much fuller, but slightly different guide
to conventions is Maurice Crouse, 'Citing Electronic
Information in History Papers'.
Page authored and posted by P.J.P.Goldberg, 2002, revised 2004, 2007.
RETURN TO DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY STUDY SKILLS PAGE
Return to Dr Goldberg's homepage